Several different types of electronic devices commonly available today are capable of delivering video content streams or segments for presentation to a user. Such devices may include, for example, digital versatile disk (DVD) players, desktop and laptop computers, and digital video recorders (DVRs), whether configured as a standalone DVR unit or incorporated within a terrestrial, cable, or satellite television receiver, or “set-top box”. In addition to presenting a video stream at a normal presentation rate (i.e., at a standard or “real-time” rate), such devices normally allow the use of “trick modes”, such as pause, slow-motion, and high-speed fast-forward and reverse, under the control of a user.
To perform a high-speed fast-forward or reverse operation, the device presents some subset of the video frames of the content, one at a time, to progress through the stream at a faster-than-normal pace, such as two, four, eight, or sixteen times the normal presentation rate. To perform the operation, the device typically estimates the data distance between frames being selected and presented to the user during the high-speed presentation, with larger distances being used for higher-speed presentations. Given the variability in the amount of data that may be associated with each frame, such estimation may result in significant variations in playback speed in the absence of any indexing data denoting the locations and relative timing of at least some of the video frames in the stream. In addition, in light of this same variability, the time required to search for the beginning of a complete video frame for presentation to the user during a trick mode may be quite variable as well, thus possibly resulting in a high-speed presentation that appears erratic from the user's perspective.